Lucille Clifton's seventh collection [Quilting: Poems 1987-1990] offers a poet who lives multiple lives and is of multiple, often contradictory minds, as an African-American and a woman living the "inexplicable life" of a poet. The book's title and its sections named after quilt patterns ("CatalpaFlower," "Eight-pointed Star," "Tree of Life") supply a visual metaphor for the vibrant wholeness of vision the book achieves through its many patterns of speech and points of focus, but "quilting" is not a necessary device for making it all work. Clifton's vision, as we have come to know it in her earlier work as well, is large, diffuse, and sensual, always empathie, and often fierce in the deft, sultry manner of a lioness stalking and striking.

These poems do not depart significantly in style or music from Clifton's earlier work. They are mostly brief, driving to the quick of what she has to say, and many echo the sometimes-defiant, sometimes-celebratory rhythms and speech patterns of African-American idioms, folk songs, and spirituals. The presence behind the poems, however, speaks from new depths presaged by poems such as "to my last period," where the poet who paid bold "homage" to her hips in an earlier collection now acknowledges the passing of her body to a more autumnal time, a somber maturity:

well girl, goodbye,
after thirty-eight years.
thirty-eight years and you
never arrived
splendid in your red dress
without trouble for me
somewhere, somehow.

now it is done,
and i feel just like
the grandmothers who,
after the hussy has gone,
sit holding her photograph
and sighing, wasn't she
beautiful? wasn't she beautiful?

In this collection, Clifton begins to emerge as a cronefigure: not in the sense of having lost sensual connection to the body, but rather as taking on the role of an elder, a custodian of records, a visionary who understands both the doomed and redemptive sides of mankind. Her visionary presence especially informs the brilliant series of poems spoken by Adam, Eve, and Lucifer in the book's final section, "Tree of Life," which resurrects the first terror, the first wonder, and the first relentless urge towards life which still nourish and torment us, though we often forget it.

Eve yields not so much to temptation as to the pure truth Lucifer tells her in a dream: "it is your own lush self / you hunger for / he whispers lucifer / honey-tongue" ("eve's version".) Adam reels under the dawning sense of separation within himself, the burden of his missing rib, as he acknowledges "some need in me / struggling to roar through my / mouth into a name / this creation is so fierce / i would rather have been born" ("adam thinking"). Lucifer flashes through these poems as "the bearer of lightning / and of lust," sensuous and fallen ("lucifer understanding at last"). He leaves the angels, his former compatriots, bereft of something vital: "in / perpetual evening … all of us / going about our / father's business / less radiant / less sure" ("whispered to lucifer").

Clifton addresses her role as spokeswoman for the past in an untitled poem at the start of this collection when she says: "I am often accused of tending to the past / as if I … sculpted it / with my own hands." She goes on to assert, however, that the past simply waited for her to come, "a monstrous unnamed baby" which she "took to breast," named "History," and allowed to grow on its own:

she is more human now,
learning language everyday,
remembering faces, names and dates,
when she is strong enough to travel
on her own, beware, she will.

In addition to her resurrection of mankind's first gestures, Clifton isolates small pieces of the recent past and gives them dimension in the many poems she dedicates to others: the first child killed in the 1976 Soweto riot ("… and there was light around the young / boy hector peterson dead in soweto and still among us / yes," from "poem beginning in no and ending in yes"); Nelson and Winnie Mandela ("walk out old chief, old husband, / enter again your own wife," from "february 11,1990"); a friend dead from cancer ("4/25/89 late"), her grandmother ("grandma, we are poets"), and others.

Clifton reopens the past especially effectively in several poems set on old plantations, where she wanders through a slave cabin or an old cemetery, resurrecting from scanty evidence the outer lives and sometimes the inner lives of slave women who lived and died anonymously. In the beam of her attention, these women briefly and indelibly reclaim their place in history: "nobody mentioned slaves / yet the curious tools / shine with your fingerprints," she says in "at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, south Carolina, 1989." And she concludes with an incantation that works as invocation, honoring the space on each tombstone where a name should be:

tell me your dishonored names.
here lies
here lies
here lies
here lies
hear

Naming arises throughout this volume as Clifton's urgent and healing task, both on behalf of the nameless who have lived bravely, and also as part her own ongoing struggle to have her language be heard on its own terms. Inspecting an old bench in the poem, "slave cabin, sotterly plantation, maryland, 1989," Clifton reflects on the woman who sat there day after day, rounding and polishing its wood with the press of her bottom, "feet dead against the dirty floor / humming for herself humming / her own sweet human name." Clifton's own task, despite her acclaim as a poet, involves her in a similar isolation, the malaise of not being heard on her own terms: "… even the best believe / they have that right, / believe that / what they say i mean / is what i mean / as if words only matter in the world they know" ("note to my self').

In the quietly defiant poem titled "grandma we are poets," Clifton spins a definition of herself as a poet from definitions for the word autism taken from Webster's New Universal Dictionary and the Random House Encyclopedia. Against the notion of "state of mind / characterized by daydreaming" she writes, "say rather / i imagined myself / in the place before / language imprisoned itself / in words." Against the notion of "failure to use language normally," she writes, "say rather that labels / and names rearranged themselves / into description / so that what i saw / i wanted to say"….

These are not arrogant poems, but each one is effortlessly honest, implying hers and others' quiet victories against great odds. Clifton speaks from the freedom of an individual who acknowledges her full female self, including the losses suffered by heart and body. Like the menstrual blood she describes in "poem in praise of menstruation," her poems are both dark and nourishing, painful and life-giving, a "wild river" that "flows also / through animals / beautiful and faithful and ancient / and female and brave."